According to some U.S. anti-public health care propaganda, the Canadian government draws up lists of who is going to die and who will receive organ donations, and bureaucrats tell people which doctors they can see. We all know that isn’t true, but how good is Canadian health care?Continue...

Most studies agree alcohol is okay in moderation, but booze can hardly be considered a healthy substance. Some of the serious health problems caused by excessive drinking include liver damage, short-term hypertension, decreased testosterone production, increased estrogen production and vitamin deficiencies.Continue...

Ice Skating. Skating is a fun way to work your leg muscles and burn up to 200 calories an hour. Victoria Park and City Park skating rinks are open on weekends and during the evenings on weekdays. Springer Market Square downtown is open all day until 10 p.m. seven days a week, starting in December once temperatures drop below freezing.Continue...

In an effort to lose weight and power-walk their way to fitness, many people have turned to pedometers as their own personal trainers. Because Queen’s students typically walk a significant amount, I decided to see if the amount of walking we do day-to-day amounts to a decent form of exercise.Continue...

In any given academic year, one in 10 Queen’s students will seek counselling through Health, Counselling and Disability Services (HCDS) at the La Salle building on Stuart St. That’s 1,800 students from the months of September to April, with spikes during the week before exams.

HCDS Director Mike Condra said only eight out of the 16 counsellors at HCDS are full time. The rest only work during peak times. Three of them are psychologists, the rest have masters degrees in either psychology, counselling, social work or education.Continue...

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This is Michael Pollan’s blunt dieting advice in his book In Defense of Food, a new work in the diet literature roster advocating healthy basics rather than fad diets.

In the age of counting carbs and calories, Pollan provides the refreshingly simple prognosis of cutting processed foods out of your diet and consuming wholesome, nutritious food.Continue...

We’ve all committed the crime, but Clemson University scientists dropped a piece of deli meat on a tiled floor and found it picked up 99 per cent of the bacteria within five seconds. Toss that runaway Skittle in the garbage. It isn’t worth the germs.Continue...

Walking around campus, it’s hard to deny we live in an age of commercialized sanitation. Because of the H1N1 pandemic, hand sanitizer dispensers have been installed at the entrance of nearly every building on campus. But is this a good thing? Although hand hygiene is an important means of preventing the contact transmission of viruses and flus such as H1N1 some question our obsession with sanitation.Continue...

What has stood for two years as a shadowy construction site tucked away behind the JDUC is now a magnificent new exercise pavilion for the Queen’s community. The much-anticipated Phase I of the Queen’s Centre is finally open.Continue...

The eating of animals isn’t a new subject, nor is it a subject suddenly illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, appropriately titled Eating Animals.

What’s new is the malleability with which Foer approaches the facts of the farming practice, which steer away from the typically mundane animal-rights rhetoric into a compelling non-fiction piece.Continue...